The History of the Chicago White Sox

  In the 30 years from 1921 to 1950, the White Sox had six winning seasons. In 1951, Minnie Miñoso came to town.  Miñoso was the first black player in White Sox history, and it took a lot for him to get to the majors. He spent the first two years of his career playing for the New York Cubans of the Negro Leagues, the only place where black players were allowed to play at the time. Jackie Robinson broke the MLB color barrier after Miñoso’s second season, and Miñoso gave it a shot the following year. He played 11 games in Cleveland’s minor league system and absolutely shredded single-a ball. He hit for a .525 batting average and a 1.412 OPS, numbers that were absolutely good enough to get him promoted to double-a, if not triple-a, but no promotion came. Miñoso returned to the Negro Leagues for the rest of the 1948 season.  In 1949, Miñoso started the year in triple-a and eventually made his way to Cleveland’s major league roster. He only spent nine games in the majors b...

            In the wake of the Black Sox Scandal, the White Sox roster was completely devastated. The team that the sox put on the field in 1921 was closer to an expansion team’s first season than the perennial contender that they had been. In a way, that makes sense. In my eyes, the story of the White Sox begins here. Everything that we have seen to this point has been prologue. The story of the Chicago White Sox is a story of a team that fell from grace, committed one of the worst scandals in sports history, and the long, long road to redemption.  The Wikipedia page for the history of the Chicago White Sox refers to this era as “the lean years”, and that’s pretty accurate. From 1921 to 1957, the White Sox would never finish a season better than third in the American League. The 1921 team finished the year with the worst record in team history. That record was broken by the 1929 team. And broken again by the 1931 team. And again by the 1932 team....

  The 1919 World Series is forever known as the stage for one of the most famous scandals in the history of North American professional sports.    The Black Sox Scandal has left behind a complicated legacy in which it is extremely hard to separate fact from fiction. Much of public opinion today comes from the 1963 book and subsequent 1988 movie Eight Men Out , which told the story of the scandal. The book and movie have come under heavy scrutiny in recent years, accused of oversimplifying the events around the scandal and completely fabricating characters and events to create a more interesting story. The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) created a book in 2015 called Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox that is a collection of papers attempting to set the record straight on a series of stories in and around the team. One of these papers, The Black Sox Scandal , is an attempt by writer Bill Lamb to tell the story of the scandal in as accurate...

          The 1906 Cubs are one of the greatest baseball teams of all time. They were making the first of four World Series appearances in five years, and their roster featured four players who would later be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The 1906 Cubs won the National League with a record of 116-36, which to this day is the highest win rate (76.3%) in MLB history. This was their seventh NL title. The Cubs were undoubtedly baseball royalty, one of the NL’s premier franchises.  The thing is, the White Sox were a premier franchise, too. At this point, the White Sox were the most successful team in American League history. They had won three of the first seven AL pennants. In the last part, I spent a lot of time talking about Ban Johnson, the American League’s first commissioner, and Charles Comiskey, the founder of the White Sox. I talked a lot about how they were good friends, and that close relationship made sure that the White Sox were se...